About 7 p.m., Yglesias and I hear a volley of gunfire. Our crack instincts tell us the shots came from the southeast. Sure enough, they came from the northwest. We rush outside to the porch to see what we can see -- maybe there's been a murder -- and our neighbors come out as well. Suddenly, the neighborhood looks like George Pelecanos would recognize it.

At the liquor store at the southwest corner of Florida and 14th, uniformed cops arrest two thin teenagers, one of whom wears garish sneakers that Yglesias admires. But no one sees any evidence of gunfire: no broken glass, no spiderwebbed windshields, no bodies. That becomes apparent when, up the block at Belmont, at the southern edge of the shopping mall of the damned, police begin taping off a crime scene. We walk over. I catch a cop and display my top-notch reporter skills: